Professor of Leadership at Kent Business School at the University of Kent. His main research areas are leadership and organisational communication. His most recent book, co-edited with Owen Hargie, is Auditing Organisational Communication: A Handbook of Research, Theory and Practice.

Professor of Leadership & Organisation at Lancaster University Management School. Previously at the Universities of Warwick, Manchester, St. Andrews and South Florida, David is the founding co-editor of the journal Leadership. He has published five books and over 100 articles and chapters informed by and contributing to critical perspectives on leadership, organisation and management studies.

Professor of Strategy and Organisational Theory in the Waikato Management School, New Zealand. His research concerns the theory and practice of discourse and rhetoric in organisational, managerial, and leadership settings.

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‘Management has to unite the organisation around a strong idea, a shared vision, and
then manage accordingly. That makes tough demands. In the company of the future
there will only be space for believers. Dissenters must look elsewhere.’

(Kunde and Cunningham, Corporate Religion, 2000)

INTRODUCTION

Today’s organisations are marked by the steady accumulation of power on the part of corporations and senior executives (Guthey, 2005;
Starbuck, 2003; Haigh, 2003), power that is often exercised through
coercive control mechanisms (Tracy, Lutgen-Sandvik, and Alberts,
2006) designed to ensure conformity (Tourish and Pinnington, 2002).
Although we are confronted almost daily by examples of the negative
consequences of coercion, we see a key contemporary concern lying
with coercion’s more subtle side. Coercive persuasion refers to the
ways in which we socially construct discursive systems of constraint
that are difficult to challenge and resist as seen in such examples as
Barker’s (1993) tightly controlled teamwork environments, the tragically
flawed decision-making on the part of Morton-Thiokol executives leading up to the Challenger disaster (Starbuck and Milliken, 1988; Tompkins, 1993) and the disciplinary processes within Enron that demonstrate how excessive levels of conformity and compliance can have
dysfunctional and even dangerous consequences for organisations
(Tourish and Vatcha 2005). While there has been some critical questioning of this growing coercive force of corporate power in our lives
(e.g. Mintzberg, 2004; Lipman-Blumen, 2005, 2007), scholars have yet
to explain fully the processes whereby unchallenged coercive persuasion becomes manifest in the daily lives of subordinates, followers and/
or employees.

This paper explores the key dynamics of coercive persuasion and contextualizes these dynamics within modern corporate culturalism, one
of its strongest manifestations. We begin by exploring coercive persuasion as a concept and situate its roots in contemporary theories of
power, conformity, and leadership. The article draws on Schein’s (1961)
foundational work on coercive persuasion to develop a framework for
describing and assessing the techniques of coercive persuasion that
often shape conformity in organisational practice. We then discuss various effects and consequences of coercive persuasion from the standpoint of modern corporate culturalism and describe the implications of
our analysis for future research.

Current Perspectives on Leadership, Power, and Con formity

The issue of conformity and its relationship to leadership is relatively
under-examined in the literature. Some social psychological studies of
leadership do address leaders’ attempts to secure followers’ conformity, but these tend to be rather uncritical, often taking for granted the
desirability of followers’ conformity. Typically, such studies argue that
leaders influence followers’ identity as an indirect means of increasing
their commitment (Chemers, 2003). Scholars, informed by the transformational leadership literature in particular, suggest that leaders need to
satisfy followers’ needs, values, and goals and confirm their identities
(Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985; Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999), in order to effect a change of attitudes generally assumed to reflect a common interest (Shamir et al, 1993). Within such approaches, legitimacy derives
from the assumption that management action is inherently rational,
such that ‘The interests of the organisation and those of management
are seen to be largely coterminous’ (Gordon et al., 2009: 16). Similarly,
Lord and Brown (2001, 2004) define leadership as a social process
through which leaders change the way followers envision themselves.
They recommend that leaders should link motivation and reward to followers’ identities, ‘activating’ the appropriate self rather than directly
stressing specific goals.

Few studies in this tradition explicitly recognize that unquestioning conformity can have harmful consequences [1][1]
Hogg (2004) is one of the few writers in this
tradition.... Seeking to prescribe and improve leaders’ control practices, these writers generally subscribe to a
rather uncritical view of organisational power relations. They assume
that power is always associated with coercion and differentiate this
from leadership, which they typically define as an influence process
that mobilises others towards the attainment of collective goals. Understanding leadership as a positive process of disproportionate social
influence (e.g. Shamir, 1999), they distinguish between influence (in
which followership is voluntary) and power (in which followers are coerced into compliance or obedience). Consequently such studies rarely
examine follower conformity or the coercive and disciplinary aspects of
leadership practices. Indeed, much of the leadership literature fails to
address the issue of power at all, particularly at what is termed a ‘deep
structure’ level (Gordon, 2002). Again, studies focusing on transformational leadership tend to under-theorise the role of dissent (Tourish
and Pinnington, 2002), under-estimate the importance of followership
(Grint, 2005) and encourage an environment in which narcissism rather than effective leadership thrives (Maccoby, 2003).

By contrast, more critical writers on organisations treat power as an
embedded, structural and pervasive feature of organisations (Barker,
1993; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). Drawing on Foucault’s (1977, 1979)
ideas in particular, they conceive of certain forms of power as also being positive, productive, and creative, since they are ‘aimed at prohibiting undesirable behaviors and promoting desirable behaviors’ (Sewell
and Barker, 2006: 935). Accordingly, these writers question the separation between power and influence, and the assumption underpinning
it according to which power is inherently negative and coercive. From
this more critical perspective, influence is one form of (leaders’) power.
Accordingly, the foregoing recommendation that leaders should try to
influence followers’ identity illustrates the very disciplinary processes
that more critical leadership writers seek to analyse (Collinson, 2005,
2006).

A questioning approach to workplace power relations has long been a
central concern of critical organisation studies (Hardy and Clegg, 1999).
Contemporary contributions have tended to focus specifically on the
inter-relationships between control and resistance. A recent special issue of Organisation, for example, highlights the continued importance
of the ‘control-resistance dualism’ within contemporary organisations,
revealing how control strategies can produce forms of resistance designed to re-affirm employee identities (Delbridge and Ezzamel, 2005).
Critical studies have demonstrated that employee resistance can take
various forms, from output restriction and foot-dragging to sabotage,
whistle blowing, and strikes (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Fleming
and Spicer, 2003). However, we see a tendency for this literature to
focus too narrowly on the relationship between control and resistance [2][2]
In the same special issue of Organisation,
Townley....
One effect is that important additional questions like employee commitment, conformity and compliance can be precluded from serious
consideration. Equally, while identity is often associated with resistance (as Delbridge and Ezzamel assert), the concern to construct and
protect self is frequently embedded in practices of conformity and compliance too, as we elaborate below.

Hence, while the mainstream leadership literature is rather uncritical in
its treatment of conformity in organisations, the more critical literature
has tended to neglect conformity in favour of a recent focus on the inter-relationship between control and resistance. Against this background,
we seek to develop a more critical analysis of both the ways in which
conformity can be manufactured in organisations (through particular
leadership practices) and the potentially detrimental consequences of
such processes. The Nazi extermination of six million Jews and the
explanation offered by those involved that they were simply ‘obeying orders’ serves as a stark reminder of the potential dangers of conformity.
Accordingly, we draw inspiration from earlier classic works on conformity, especially that of Milgram (1974), whose experiments highlighted
people’s willingness to obey authority, and Fromm (1941), who pointed
to ‘the fear of freedom’, whereby individuals try to shelter in the perceived security of being told what to do and think, viewing this apparent
security as a less threatening alternative to the responsibility of making
decisions for themselves.

Coercive Power and Coercive Persuasion

To develop further our conceptualisation of coercive persuasion within
contemporary organisations, we draw on the renowned work of Schein
(1961) to describe how corporate leaders may construct a social environment that coercively channels the physical, intellectual and emotional energies of employees towards conformity. We begin by differentiating between coercive persuasion and coercive power, the latter simply
relying on the forced compliance of subjects to decreed organisational
norms (‘come to work on time tomorrow or you are sacked’). We assert
that coercive persuasion, on the other hand, encourages subjects to
internalise dominant cultural norms as their own, subsequently producing individuals deemed to be ‘appropriate’ by the ruling group (Alvesson
and Willmott, 2002) while disguising many of the elements of compulsion that are involved, even from those directly affected (Tompkins and
Cheney, 1985).

Weber (1978) famously characterised rule based and rational control
as an ‘iron cage’, tightly controlling forms of behaviour. Foucault (1977)
discussed the notion of a Panopticon: a model for a prison in which the
threat of constant and inescapable surveillance was sufficient to condition the behaviour of inmates in ‘desirable’ directions, replacing exclusive reliance on rules and bureaucracy [3][3]
As Simon (2005) has pointed out, the notion of Panopticon.... As many have suggested, the
notion of a perfect Panopticon is illusory: there is always some means of
avoiding total surveillance. Resistance to control has been documented in many seemingly all powerful contexts (Simon, 2005). In addition,
Foucault was most concerned by how the process of external observation compelled the adoption of centrally sanctioned behavioural norms,
particularly since inmates could never be certain when they were being
observed. This uncertainty required consistent conformity as observed
‘deviancy’ could attract punishment from the unseen observer.

From the perspective of coercive persuasion, Foucault’s (1991) notion of ‘governmentality’ is also relevant. This expression, combining
government and rationality, notes that government depends on ways
of knowing. Vocabularies of knowledge are constructed by powerful
groups to establish their legitimacy. Various regulatory systems, forms
of administration and knowledge mechanisms are therefore also employed to this end (Townley, 1993). It follows that knowledge formation is not neutral; rather, it is the contested end product of attempts
by more or less powerful actors to establish their version of the truth.
Totalising managerial discourses are therefore common (McKinlay and
Starkey, 1998).

Consistent with this suggestion of conflict, we see coercive persuasion as a means of linking surveillance with intense indoctrination. Coercive persuasion seeks to convince those at the receiving end that
the sincere adoption of the designated belief systems is wholly consistent with their own self interest. Such coercive persuasion arises
from the recognition by both the persuader and the person being persuaded that legitimacy involves the degree to which an elite’s right to
govern is recognised. Such recognition is more likely, as Courpasson
(2000: 142) has argued, when ‘existing legitimate authority perpetuates itself by incorporating soft practices and articulating these with
hierarchical and formal bureaucratic practices.’ When organisational
members embrace, either partially or completely, an ideological orientation sanctioned by powerful leaders, it follows that the legitimacy
of organisational structures, hierarchies and practices is more clearly
established.

This perspective on coercive persuasion is also very much in line with
traditional liberal conceptualisations of work (Sewell and Barker, 2006)
that emphasize an employee’s needs to act in ways that benefit the
greater organisation and its members. Thus, adopting a designated
belief system helps to stem the tendency, for example, toward slacking, as the employee would experience an intense internal, but discursively created, drive to act in ways consistent with the needs of the
organisation.

While resistance certainly occurs, and doubts may be harboured, some
will also find themselves ‘convinced’ by the type of coercive persuasion discussed in this paper. If this occurs, those concerned will be
more likely to adopt a ‘converted’ mindset, and thus display zealous
behaviours that are aligned with the belief system chosen for them
by powerful others. Under these conditions, minimal external surveillance may be required to ensure that behaviours consistent with the
belief system are enacted. As Townley (1993: 520) notes, following
Foucault, ‘power is not associated with a particular institution, but with
practices, techniques and procedures’. Such a view avoids the widespread conception of coercion as a process aimed at getting people to
do what they would otherwise not want to; if, by contrast, they can be
‘coercively persuaded’ by the deployment of various techniques into
internalising a given ideology, they will be convinced that behaviours
approved of by powerful organisational actors are actually undertaken
of the subject’s own volition, rather than by force of command. How
might such outcomes be achieved? One answer begins with Schein’s
(1961) early analysis of coercive persuasion, which, we argue, still has
much relevance for our thinking today.

Schein’s Techniques of Coercive Persuasion

The notion of coercive persuasion grew out of Schein’s study of US
POWs detained in Korea in the 1950s [4][4]
His analysis is strikingly consistent with the
contemporaneous.... Their Chinese captors successfully convinced many of the POWs to internalise Communist beliefs,
adopt an appropriate Communist identity, and show intense commitment by adopting proselytising behaviours on behalf of the new belief
system. Temporarily, many maintained their new belief system even
after they were released from captivity (Taylor, 2004). On the basis of
this quite remarkable outcome, Schein proposed that

if a prisoner was physically restrained from leaving a situation in which learning was the only alternative, they would eventually learn through a process of
‘cognitive redefinition’. They would eventually come to understand the point
of view of the captor and reframe their own thinking so that the judgment of
having been guilty became logical and acceptable. In effect they had undergone what might be called a ‘conversion’ experience except it did not happen
in the sudden way that religious conversions are often described. (Schein,
1961: 165)

This process is reminiscent of what has been dubbed ‘the Stockholm
syndrome’ (Giebels et al., 2005) in which kidnap victims come to overidentify with their kidnappers, resist rescue, refuse to testify against
them in court or, as with the heiress turned revolutionary Patty Hearst
(Watkins, 1976), adopt a new identity in keeping with the kidnappers’
value systems. Clearly, as with the POWs in Schein’s study, kidnap
victims are under intense physical and emotional stress. Some identify
with their captors to minimise the omnipresent threat of violence. Since
it is difficult to achieve any sense of perspective under these conditions,
they may also invest the smallest act of kindness by their kidnappers
with an importance out of proportion to the act itself [5][5]
Victims may also see rescue attempts as a
threat,.... Coercive persuasion can reinforce a new group identity that, paradoxically, is shared
with people who may previously have appeared to be in a position of
polar opposition to the victim.

Schein identifies a variety of conditions that facilitate such outcomes.
We summarise these in Exhibit 1 and rearticulate the techniques to
express how they can become manifest in today’s organisations. We
then discuss the techniques in detail, paying particular attention to how
these conditions link to contemporary corporate practices.

Table 1 - The Key Techniques of Coercive Persuasion

Technique

1. Reference Group Affiliation.

Schein’s Techniques from POW Experiences

Prisoners faced an indeterminate sentence. This

raised anxiety and created an impetus to affiliate with
a new reference group as a means of reducing it.

Modern Organisational Translation of Technique
Environmental changes, new entrants, and

turnover create organisational anxiety. We seek
alignment with reference groups to reduce the

anxiety and increase conformance.

2. Role Modelling.

Prisoners were placed with others who were more
advanced in the learning process, who role mod-

elled ‘successful’ conformity and were rewarded for
doing so. Prisoners were tempted to emulate their
attitudes and behaviours to secure similar benefits.

Organisations develop systems of role modelling
and mentoring so that members learn appropriate
behaviour. We learn from and come to emulate
those in positions of power over us as we seek

to meet their expectations, which increases

conformity.

3. Peer Pressures.

Rewards were given only on a group basis, and

only if all members of the group embraced the

new point of view. This intensified peer pressure to
conform.

Focus on team working, shared rewards, and

shared consequences intensifies peer pressure
to conform.

4. Alignment of Identity.

The new point of view was articulated repeatedly
and in many forms. Repetition ensured that it

eventually acquired a self-evident and eventually
unchallengeable status.

Modern workers buy into the firm’s strategic

vision and shape their behaviours accordingly.

Conformity to the vision and values becomes part
of our identity.

5. Performance Assessment.

Written confession and self-criticism became a

regular activity, so that prisoners assessed past

actions from a new point of view. Problems with

the new belief system were viewed as examples of
individual rather than systemic weaknesses.

Employees are assessed based on their

conformity with strategy and practice, including
mechanisms such as 360-degree feedback. As
individuals, we are expected to conform and the
system is assumed to be correct.

Conformists are rewarded. Dissent, such as
whistle blowing or resistance, is sanctioned
strongly.

7. Communication Systems.

Communications that in any way reinforced the

old point of view or that reminded the prisoner of
previous attachments were withheld or eliminated
entirely. The past became ever more remote; the
present acquired heightened power to shape attitudes, emotions and behaviours.

Management and control of communication

becomes central to the organisation. Companies
exert increased control of stakeholder information
and management engagement with stakeholders.

8. Physical Pressure and Work Life Balance.

Physical pressures were constantly applied to

weaken the prisoner’s physical strength, with sleep
deprivation being the most potent of these pres

sures; ‘torture’ was only used as a punishment for
insincerity or lack of motivation to learn.

Members are expected to work longer hours and
expend greater effort as a means of demonstrating conformity and commitment. Individuals are
expected to demonstrate fortitude to overcome
the physical demands of labour.

9. Psychological Safety.

Psychological safety was produced for prisoners

by fellow prisoners who were further along in their
‘re-education’ and could be supportive of the target
prisoner’s effort

Psychological contracts become invested in
expectations of conformity. Mutual support of
leaders creates both psychological safety and
conformance.

In order to reduce anxiety, individuals may seek to align themselves
with reference groups. The effect of this process is to increase conformity. In Schein’s study, the POWs’ only hope of redemption and
release was when they made a confession that their captors judged
to be sincere. This was a powerful incentive for conformity and an
equally powerful punishment for dissent. Clearly, corporations are not
POW camps. Nevertheless, employees frequently face management
demands for conformity and the internalisation of belief systems sympathetic to corporate values. An example is Barker’s (1993: 431-432)
jarring account of forced confession and redemptive acceptance of
conformity in peer work groups. Of course, like the POWs, we do have
the option of concealed resistance such as by pretending towards a
sincere, penitent and converted mindset. However, performances of
this kind contain their own hazards. As Goffman (1959: 28) stresses,
‘one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can
be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is
the real reality.’ In any event, coercive persuasion seeks to produce a
genuine desire for conformity rather than its facsimile. Pressure alone
is unlikely to have such an impact. Rather, a process of enculturation is
also required. How is this likely to be achieved?

The key lies in the emulation of conformist rituals that are commonplace in organisations. For example, Kunda (1992) demonstrates, in
an ethnographic study of a hi-tech American corporation, how such rituals are developed by leaders to inculcate the ‘right beliefs’ and produce
an ‘acceptable’ organisational identity. Employees may then play along
with these rituals, rather than reveal what might be described as a ‘bad
attitude.’ But this also renders employees liable to internalise the values
behind the rituals, even if they have initially resisted them. In essence,
like a method actor over preparing a part, the person internalises a role
to such an extent that they become indistinguishable from their performance. It is likely that many of the POWs in Schein’s study embarked on
a similar course of action, only to find that their dissimulation gradually
eroded pre-existing beliefs and helped install new values and codes of
conduct in their place. Tourish and Vatcha (2005) have argued that this
dynamic within Enron helps to explain the enthusiastic and seemingly
genuine commitment by many of its employees to its internal rituals and
to what ultimately proved to be its self-destructive beliefs.

2. Organisations develop systems of role modelling and mentor ing so that members learn appropriate behaviour.

This provides the subjects of coercive persuasion with role models and
socially legitimised identities to emulate. In Schein’s study, prisoners
could also see at first hand the rewards attached to adopting the prescribed organisational identity of ‘the good Communist’ and to demonstrating high levels of commitment through the enthusiastic display of
behaviours consistent with their new identity. This dynamic is consistent
with social identity theory, which asserts that individuals identify themselves with respect to various group memberships and tend to classify
others into one or more categories (e.g. ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’) in
order to identify similarities and differences (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). It
is also seen in Barker’s (1993) description of placing new team members with longer-tenured members for ‘proper’ socialisation. Individuals
establish a positive social identity and confirm association by showing preference to members of their own social category. As Jost and
Elsbach (2001: 183) argued, ‘we derive a great deal of personal value
and meaning from our group memberships, so that our self-concepts
depend in significant ways upon the ways in which our groups are regarded by ourselves and by others’, a point echoed in the organisational identification literature (e.g. Tompkins and Cheney, 1983).

In the case of the POWs, more long standing members of the group
would have appeared as experienced survivors and hence as positive
role models. Following Tompkins and Cheney (1985), identifying with
their behaviours, and subsequently internalising their attitudes would
have been logical survival behaviour, helping to forge a new group
identity of considerable value and strength.

More broadly, scholars have argued that the power of leaders in so-called ‘high demand’ groups increases as a result of the identity related benefits accruing from conformity that are provided by other group
members (Baron et al., 2003). Acceptance by the members of such
groups feels gratifying to those joining it, increasing the desire to affiliate. But affiliation is dependent on the acceptance and eventual internalisation of the norms within the group concerned, an acceptance that,
in a punitive and disorienting environment, feels attractive because it
reduces uncertainty about what to think, feel and do (Hogg, 2001).
Thus, if we accept that people are attracted by the idea of order, then
the embrace of ideological commitment offers many attractions. A comprehensive belief system can appear to explain the world and the place
of the individual within it. Under conditions of stress and uncertainty,
ideological totalism of this kind may become more alluring, especially if
people’s need for security increases. Such dynamics reinforce leader
power since the leaders define norms of behaviour and ideology, and
thus set the parameters within which acceptance or exclusion from the
valued group is likely to occur. In a similar way, new recruits to corporate organisations are typically predisposed to follow more established
employees, whose longevity suggests they are familiar with organisational belief systems and their associated rituals of conformity.

A number of general group theories point toward the potential impact
of this technique. As the Milgram (1974) and Asch (1951) experiments
demonstrated, we are strongly inclined to act on the basis of authority
and to change our behaviours to be more consistent with those of other
group members, particularly when members of the group have a higher
status than we do. In the case of the POWs in Korea, rewards were
dependent on compliance. Those already inclined toward compliance
were thereby provided with a tremendous incentive to increase their
pressure on the rest. Given their already strong tendency to conform
to the emergent group norms, this additional pressure created an even
more powerful context for conversion. It also provided an incentive for
at least some group members to engage in the surveillance of their fellows in an expression of what Foucault (1977; 1982) regarded as disciplinary power. Such surveillance enforces norms of behaviour among
all parties to a social interaction (Sewell and Barker, 2006), ensuring
that alternative forms of being and doing are pushed to the margins
of the group’s tightly policed activities and consciousness (Lacombe,
1996).

Thus, in a parallel process, workplace surveillance systems increasingly seek to produce conformist (i.e. compliant and pliant) individuals
in the workplace. The growing emphasis on teamwork is an important
mechanism for unleashing similar dynamics in the form of peer pressure (Barker, 1993). Many such systems use group-based incentives
and rewards, as well as other mechanisms, to create powerful systems of peer pressure. In Foucault’s terms, these processes illustrate
the disciplinary effects of power and identity and the barriers they can
create for resistance (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). Corporate culture
initiatives (Kunda, 1992), performance assessment systems (Townley,
1994), and information gathering systems (Zuboff, 1988) have all been
explored in ways consistent with our view of coercive persuasion. For
example, Mehri’s (2006) study of the lean production system at Toyota
contrasted the official company rhetoric with a more coercive reality
noting that ‘Employees are expected to follow all rules and obey the
prescribed code of behaviour that exists at the company’ (Mehri, 2006:
26). Researchers have argued that such approaches seek to regulate, discipline and control employee selves, while camouflaging such
intentions in the more benign rhetoric of family values and empowerment (Martin, 1999). Culture, in such contexts, becomes another form
of social control (Willmott, 1993; 2003), regardless of the emancipatory
rhetoric through which it may be expressed.

4. Modern workers buy into the firm’s strategic vision and shape their behaviours accordingly.

Repeated presentations give any vision multiple advantages. Firstly,
research into influence and persuasion suggests that we are inclined
to believe that whatever is repeated is more likely to be true (Cialdini,
2001). Secondly, in the example of Korea, when presentations were offered by authority figures in whom the prisoners had some confidence
(in particular, by fellow prisoners who were further along in the conversion process), they were even more inclined to give the message undue
credence. The perceived expertise (Bohner et al., 2002) and trustworthiness (Di Blasi, 2003) of the person articulating the message added
enormously to its potency. Moreover, the message itself was presented
as if it articulated a set of self evident, scientific, and unchallengeable
truths, much in the same manner as the reality of corporate power often
cloaks itself in a rhetoric of personal liberation (e.g. Peters, 1992) and
‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1993) today. Communist ideology was
presented to the prisoners in highly selective generalities emphasising
human liberation. Such an appeal to a wider social interest is a regularly used means of ensuring that domination acquires the trappings of
legitimacy rendering the internalisation of a given ideology much more
attractive (Miller, 1989).

Likewise, corporate ideology fixes on such questions as competitive
success for the company, the notion of unitary interests between corporate owners and employees, and the blissful future which the success
of the corporation will ensure for all those fortunate enough to affiliate
with it. The internalisation of such messages, should it occur, confers
advantages on those who have developed them, and whose interests
they serve. As Townley (1993: 519) in applying a Foucauldian perspective to management issues, writes, ‘what counts as truth depends on,
or is determined by, the conceptual system in operation.’ The repeated
articulation of what may be viewed as contentious corporate ideologies
seeks to reshape the conceptual systems of employees, thereby reinforcing their acceptance of and devotion to particular ideals.

5. Members are assessed based on their conformity with strategy and practice.

Criticism and self-criticism in a group context is a powerful tool of discipline and conversion (Baron, 2000) and was widely used in Korea. Such
self-criticism has been extensively and more broadly documented as
an approach used by leaders of organisations that emphasise extreme
forms of conformity and compliance (Lalich, 2004). Group members are
bombarded with monotonous and simplified messages, shorn of all ambiguity and uncertainty. Criticism and self-criticism sessions establish
that any difficulties perceived with the message, or in its implementation,
arise from followers’ insufficient compliance and devotion rather than
from weaknesses in either the message or the overall social system.
This in turn erodes people’s confidence in whatever critical perceptions
they hold prior to joining the group, and increases their dependence on
the group and its leader for ‘guidance, interpretation, explanation and
normative control over activity and choices’ (Baron et al., 2003: 173). Approval from such leaders depends on ever greater levels of conformity.
Even if the belief is not fully internalised, a person hearing nothing but
a one-note message is eventually likely to be compelled to draw from
it when expressing their own opinions (Tourish, 1998). The more public people’s statements in support of a new belief become, the more
likely it is that their internal views will shift to be consistent with their
external behaviours (Cialdini, 2001). When our views shift far enough
from their starting position, the outcome can be defined as conversion.
Moreover, once enough people internalise an ‘appropriate’ attitude, this
may produce organisational contexts reminiscent of what Aldous Huxley
described in Brave New World as a ‘really efficient totalitarian state’; that
is, one ‘in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their
army of managers controls a population of slaves who do not have to be
coerced, because they love their servitude’ (Huxley, 2004: xxxv).

We find plentiful corporate parallels. Appraisal systems are commonly
used not just to monitor performance, but also ‘to foster identification
with corporate goals and objectives and inculcate organisational standards’ (Fairhurst, 2007: 83). Individuals are permanently on show, and
their performance and attitudes are subject to examination. Some appraisal systems go much further, and seek to identify ‘poor’ performers
for dismissal (so-called ‘rank and yank’ systems), thereby activating internal dynamics very similar to the criticism and self criticism processes
identified by Schein (Tourish and Vatcha, 2005). Managers are required
to identify lots of problems with behaviours, levels of commitment and
attitudes. Employees are then required to ‘confess’ their weaknesses
and agree action plans to resolve them in order to survive the culling
process. The focus here also tends to be on individual failings rather
than systemic weaknesses, an emphasis which creates further pressure
towards conformity and conversion, while minimising the scope for productive dissent.

6. Conformists are rewarded, dissent, such as whistle blowing or resistance, is sanctioned strongly.

Again, reinforcement theory demonstrates that rewards have a potent
effect in shaping behaviour (Hargie and Dickson, 2004). When people
experience rewards for conformity and punishment for resistance, the
volume of dissent will likely diminish while the clamour of conformist
opinion will increase (Kassing, 2001). There is abundant evidence
that the penalising of dissent has become an organisational norm,
with a consequent increase in ingratiating behaviours on the part of
employees (principally overt, enthusiastic and excessive agreement
with the ideas propounded by leaders and managers) utilised as a
means of both surviving and trying to acquire influence over managers (Tourish and Robson, 2006). In short, it is increasingly normal
within the corporate milieu for people to find their dissenting options
significantly restricted while their ingratiating/conformist behaviours
are rewarded.

7. Management and control of communication becomes central to the organisation.

In Korea, the captors’ intention was to cut people adrift from previously
influential sources of information and to ensure that only information
consistent with the new world view penetrated their social environment.
By heightening interaction within the prisoner’s new reference group,
the potential influence of those within the group on shaping new attitudes was also significantly strengthened.

In the business world today, the issue of identity construction is generally ‘closely tied up with the ways organisations organise their “world”
in terms of communication’ (Cheney and Christensen, 2001: 241). This
emphasis on identity heightens concern with the management of internal and external communication and with controlling the boundaries between them. The management and control of communication is central
to the building of organisational culture through the creation of symbols
and the performances by which they are transmitted to and then internalised by employees (Weeks and Galunic, 2003). Communication,
rather than merely ‘carrying’ information, can thus come to be viewed
as a process which has a power to constitute organisations, rather than
merely represent them (Kuhn, 2008). It follows that some discourses
are typically more privileged than others. Recognising this, and the opportunities it affords to constrain and define reality for others, leaders
and managers can place restrictions on the communicative activities of
employees (e.g. by monitoring personal email traffic/internet access),
insist on residential training courses during which communication with
families and others is discouraged, and prohibit attendees from travelling home until the training has been completed.

8. Members are expected to work longer hours and expend greater effort as a means of demonstrating conformity and commitment.

In
the Korean context, this technique deprived POWs of the physical and
emotional reserves required for effective resistance. It also heightened
tension, thus rendering them more susceptible to messages or a new
ideology that promised to relieve them of their growing sense of vulnerability. Such pressure rendered non-compliance costly, a major means
by which coercion can shape behaviours, attitudes and emotions (Haugaard, 1997). Of course, most employees never face anything quite
so dramatic. But they do face the intensification of work brought to an
extreme in organisations such as GE, Microsoft, and the late, lamented
example of Enron, in which 70-hour work weeks and above were common. Although unlikely to be as intense as those felt by the POWs, the
psychological effects may nevertheless be similar in kind.

9. Psychological contracts become invested in expectations of conformity.

Ultimately, ‘redemption’ was depicted to the POWs in Korea as an easy
choice. It was rendered all the more attractive by the existence of ready
made role models who offered support and rewards to those former
recalcitrants now embarking on a journey similar to their own. Above all,
surrender was depicted as a capitulation to bliss. This process recalls the
climax of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in which a tearful Winston Smith
finally ‘wins’ the battle over himself: he now really loves Big Brother.

Again, there are many organisational parallels. Teams are commonly
constructed with a mixture of experienced and inexperienced members. One of their key tasks is the socialisation and acculturation of
new team members (Katzenbach and Smith, 1992). Mentoring is also
used to achieve the same effect. Employees with mentors have been
found to ‘learn the ropes’ faster than those without (Wilson and Elman,
1990). Of course, in a non-coercive environment this may be entirely
benign. But in organisations in which leaders and managers are seeking to impose an all-encompassing ideology and constricting behavioural norms on others, mentoring and team-work may simply become
another means of exercising concertive control.

The nine techniques derived from Schein’s famous study provide a
useful mechanism for engaging and assessing the force of coercive
persuasion in modern organisations, as we can readily see how the
techniques strongly encourage conformity. Below, we will apply this
framework to explore the manifestation of these techniques in the
growth of corporate culturalism.

Coercive Persuasion, Organisations and Corporate Culturism

As we have been careful to note, the imprisonment of US POWs in
Korea clearly does not exactly parallel the context of most contemporary organisations. Their detention is closer to the experience of being
confined within what Foucault (1977) termed ‘carceral institutions’ and
Goffman (1968) named ‘total institutions’, forms of organisation such
as prisons or asylums that exist in partitioned space and time separated off from the rest of the world. Problematising Foucault’s generalisation of the very tight control of incarcerating institutions to other
forms of organisation, Giddens (1984, 1987) argues that discipline
in contemporary capitalist organisations is not entirely analogous to
carceral institutions. He suggests that in capitalist society, the separation of the home from work is a key characteristic of the time-space
zoning of modernity. Emphasising the importance to employees of ‘free
time’ from capitalist organisations, Giddens contends that individuals
will conform at work, ‘usually as a trade-off for rewards that derive from
being freed from such discipline at other times’ (1984: 154). Giddens
insisted that control in less all-embracing organisations is more subtle,
utilising methods to produce collaboration and compliance rather than
the coercive control of the ‘total institution’ [6][6]
Goffman (1968) did recognise the importance of organisational....

However, other researchers question this view, highlighting the considerable influence of organisations even on our ‘personal’ time and
space. Burrell (1988) contends that ‘as individuals, we are incarcerated
within an organisational world. Thus, whilst we may not live in total institutions, the institutional organisation of our lives is total’ (1988: 232;
see also Tompkins and Cheney’s, 1985, discussion of unobtrusive control). Exploring the impact of career projects on the lives of UK accountants, Grey (1994) reveals how aspiring and conformist individuals tend
to treat all organisational and even personal relations as a means to
the end of career progress. As he suggests, the concern with career
‘links home and work, leisure, and past, present and future through
the vector of the self’. Non-work lives become totally subordinated to
the pursuit of a career with friends, who are gradually re-defined as
‘contacts, ’ while the social life is reduced to the instrumental activity
of ‘networking’. Suggesting that career projects construct individuals
as highly disciplined subjects, Grey concludes that ‘the project of self-management might be said to consist of the construction of our lives as
total institutions’ (1994: 481) [7][7]
These debates about time-space relations
and whether....

Suffice it to say here that, while we acknowledge significant differences between the case of the POWs in Korea and the experience of
working in capitalist organisations, we also highlight interesting overlaps between these contexts. Many contemporary organisations now
encourage their employees to think of their work as a way of life, a
cause, a movement, even a ‘religion’ and, ultimately, a crusade instead
of being merely a job. For leaders and managers who seek to generate
employee commitment rather than formal compliance, thought reform
(realised by means of coercive persuasion) may seem a highly desirable process. The outcome is likely to be an environment dominated
by what has been described as ‘bounded choice’ (Lalich, 2004); that is,
one in which the expression of only a limited and tightly regulated repertoire of beliefs, behaviours, and emotions is permissible. Paradoxically,
employees may embrace such environments in an attempt to reduce
uncertainty and anxiety and in pursuit of a heightened sense of greater
purpose. In the process, however, they are required to engage in ever
more extreme acts of self-renunciation, involving the subordination of
important personal norms to those of the group.

… to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the
surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action;
that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary… in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of
which they themselves are the bearers. (Foucault, 1977: 201).

We argue that the techniques of coercive persuasion are likely to produce a similar effect through creating an environment in which an officially sanctioned ideology is internalised by subjects. In such contexts,
ideology serves as a source of conscious and permanent scrutiny, functioning as an invisible internal eye, which holds the behaviour of the
subject to the ideology’s exacting standards and ensures that subjects
themselves become the instruments through which their own subordination is exercised.

Thus, efforts at coercive persuasion start with the articulation of an ideology which people are required to endorse enthusiastically, publicly,
and often. Ideology in corporate organisations is increasingly ‘rooted in
[a] sense of mission associated with charismatic leadership, developed
through traditions and sagas and then reinforced through identifications’
(Mintzberg, 1989: 223). Cheerleading rituals are crucial to a mission’s
internalisation by organisational members, as is the threat of isolation
for defiance. In particular, the increasing interest in strong corporate
cultures and in the development of associated ‘visions’ represents a
form of ideological development and underpins contemporary processes of coercive persuasion. Many management development programmes are expressly designed to produce what can be described as
conversion on the part of managers, through the adoption of corporate
evangelism, in order to convert people into ‘True Believers’ in the designated belief system (Turnbull, 2001). The rhetoric of self discovery,
faith and commitment (more often associated with religious environments) is often employed to engage people in an emotional quest for
a new identity sympathetic to corporate goals (Ackers and Preston,
1997). In the context of asymmetrical power relationships, such rhetoric can easily have a coercive undertone.

[…] aspires to extend management control by colonising the affective
domain – the hearts as well as the minds of employees – in an innovative,
oppressive and paradoxical manner – by claiming to extend their practical
autonomy […]. The implicit intent of corporate culturism […] is to establish
monocultures in which choices and decisions are made within a normative
framework of core values that are established, or at least sanctioned, by
management. (Willmott, 2003: 75)

It is frequently assumed that core organisational values must take priority over all other values. This viewpoint is often expressed in the authoritarian language of those in senior positions, intended to intimidate
and reframe individual identity within a narrow corporatist paradigm.
The following quotation is taken from an e-mail sent by Neal Patterson,
then CEO of Cerner Corporation (a major US healthcare software development company), to his line managers:

We are getting less than 40 hours of work from a large number of our […] EMPLOYEES […]. The parking lot is sparsely used at 8a.m.; likewise at 5p.m […].
NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they
had a 40-hour job […]. I STRONGLY recommend that you call some 7a.m.,
6p.m. and Saturday a.m. team meetings […]. My measurement will be the
parking lot […]. The pizza man should show up at 7.30p.m. to feed the starving
teams working late (Cited by Wong, 2001: 1 – emphasis in the original).

Such pressure on staff to work longer and longer hours, coupled with
surveillance (the parking-lot metric), illustrates how corporate leaders
can coercively persuade employees to privilege (paid) work above everything else (see also Collinson and Collinson, 2004). The discourse,
in the example given, is clearly one of surveillance, measurement, and
compulsion: an attempt to construct the leader as a subject of power
and employees as its compliant objects.

Alternative discourses to those of corporate culturism tend to be viewed
as deficient and disposable (Willmott, 1993). Corporate culturism creates a struggle for a new identity and a conflict with whatever old ones
get in the way (du Gay, 1991). The ideal state is assumed to be one
of employee devotion to corporate goals and values. It has long been
clear that one of the main tactics for dealing with people’s sense of ambivalence in the face of management power has been to depict corporate life as being much freer than it really is (Hoopes, 2003). In this context, the compulsory engagement we are highlighting is often couched
in the language of empowerment, and liberation. Fundamentally, this
discursive framing represents a ‘systematic and totalising approach to
the design and strengthening of the normative framework of work’ (du
Gay, 1991: 524 – emphasis in the original).

Coercive persuasion is rooted in the imbalance of power between key
organisational actors and reproduced through the emphasis on followers’ identity. In contemporary corporations coercive persuasion is frequently facilitated by the compelling and ‘positive’ visions of leaders
seeking to attract the enthusiastic support of employees (e.g. Deal and
Kennedy, 1982; 1999; Collins and Porras, 1995). Visions have been
defined as a set of beliefs about how people should act and interact
to attain some idealised future state (Strange and Mumford, 2002).
They are intended to establish cultures that rest on uniform values,
beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours and in which alternative discourses
are marginalised and suppressed. As Maccoby (2003: 229) has written
with specific reference to the US, the public has been ‘seduced by the
promise of visionary leaders’. Given that people want work with some
social meaning or social value, want to feel part of a larger community,
and want to live and work in an integrated fashion (Pfeffer, 2003), their
tendency to comply is hardly surprising.

Underlying these positive visions, leaders and managers typically make
all-important organisational decisions. In practice, they retain the power
to reward and punish, to define strategic direction, and to withdraw the
empowerment initiatives upon which they embark. Organisational influence sharing has therefore made remarkably little progress over the
past fifty years (Heller, 1998). Coercion thus remains an endemic characteristic of the leader-follower, management-employee relationship.

By extending leaders’ and managers’ power into the affective domain,
corporate culturism promotes a mono-culture in the workplace (at least
as the ideal) and significantly limits dissent. The intent often appears
to be to activate intense commitment on the part of employees as a
means of heightening work effort, productivity and profitability.

Within this world-view, senior managers are encouraged to influence
every area of their employees’ lives, including their behaviour at work,
their attitudes towards the organisation, and increasingly their most private values and belief systems as evidenced by a growing interest on
the part of many corporations and chief executives in promoting ‘spirituality’ in the workplace (e.g. Bell and Taylor, 2001; 2004; Fry, 2003;
Duchan and Plowman, 2005). As the quotation from Kunda and Cunningham (1999) cited at the beginning of this paper suggests, the intent
appears to be to render behaviour consistent with the needs of the
corporation, always and everywhere.

DISCUSSION

In this paper, we have examined the important dynamics of coercive
persuasion and discussed how these dynamics, shaped through leadership control practices, can come to manufacture employee conformity and minimize dissent within contemporary organisations. In a sense,
we have used Schein’s (1961) framework to cast a new light on the
subtle but essential and powerful process through which our individual
‘I’s’ become functional corporate ‘we’s’ (Burke, 1937: 140). Given the
argument that ‘power is relational because it reveals itself in its application with others vis-à-vis specific practices, techniques, or procedures’
(Fairhurst, 2007: 81), we have sought to illuminate how coercive power
can be expressed in organisations, through a series of practices aimed
at combining surveillance with the internalisation of particular ideologies deemed to be acceptable, and therefore more likely to produce
the ‘appropriate individual’. We have used Schein’s (1961) early work
on ‘coercive persuasion’ as a framework through which to identify and
assess such persuasion and then argued that contemporary corporate
attempts to sustain employee conformity through coercive persuasion
are informed by the exercise of particular forms of control that invoke
specific (legitimised) identities. In such cases dissent tends to be defined as disloyalty and punished, while conformity is rewarded. These
tensions may be especially pronounced in particular kinds of organisations. As Gordon et al (2009) have noted, such organisations as police forces play a distinctly coercive role in society, and many have
struggled with the legacy of their quasi-military past. In short, where a
tradition of hierarchy and obeying orders is particularly marked, those
who belong may be attracted to or affected by the articulation of strong
cultural values and the mechanisms of coercive persuasion discussed
in this article.

Nevertheless, we believe that the issues discussed here have a much
wider application. We have therefore connected our discussion to the
literature on organisational surveillance, and to Foucault’s influential
work on disciplinary processes within prisons, with a particular focus
on his discussion of the Panopticon. This literature focuses on ‘the
few watching the many’ (Sewell and Barker, 2006: 935), and therefore
conceives of organisational control in terms of powerful individuals exerting control over relatively powerless ones. But however insightful
much of this literature is, it cannot fully account for all the conformist
behaviours that we witness daily in organisations and that occur in the
absence of constant surveillance. We have not argued that the techniques of coercive persuasion are likely to achieve such a totalitarian
impact either and have acknowledged the forms of resistance that are
also found in most organisations. To take one example, some scholars
have claimed that call centres could be viewed as instances of perfect
panoptic surveillance (Fernie and Metcalf, 1999). Yet detailed studies
have demonstrated that resistance, both overt and covert, is a daily occurrence (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000). Thus, there is no perfect Panopticon, or other forms of social control that can infallibly regulate human
behaviour (Simon, 2005).

Despite this, coercive persuasion seeks to combine both explicit forms
of surveillance and intense indoctrination, in order to ensure that those
at its receiving end are more likely to internalise dominant ideological norms as their own. Such ‘thought reform’ (Lifton, 1961) reduces
the need for surveillance, since if people embrace a particular belief
system and the norms that are associated with it, they can guide their
behaviour in desired directions with minimal external oversight. While
Schein studied this phenomenon in a particularly coercive context, we
have argued that these coercive persuasion techniques are still found
in a modern corporate context, and thus warrant our understanding and
critique. Schein (1961) himself drew attention to similarities between
the techniques he was exploring and their use in other contexts such
as religious orders, prisons, educational institutions, and mental hospitals. But he also recognised that these methods only exerted an effect
in some cases due to the interaction between the techniques and such
factors as individual predisposition, innate interest in whatever ideology
was being promoted, and social context (Introvigne, 2002). Hence,
the outcome of compliance and conversion is partially determined by
the content of the ideology in question as well as by the specific techniques that are employed in its promotion. The general dominance of
and unquestioning attitude towards a managerial or pro-business ideology in today’s society would suggest that when techniques of coercive
persuasion are employed in a corporate context, they may be operating
within a particularly fruitful environment since the techniques will be
building upon attitudes that are already at least partially in place.

Thus, we argue that the notion of coercive persuasion represents an
under-utilised analytic lens through which to study power, conformity,
and resistance in organisations. The application of the nine techniques
in Schein’s framework provides a model for engaging and interrogating
both the pull toward and the possibility of resistance against (Zoller and
Fairhurst, 2007) conformity in modern organisations. This article has
suggested that, by focusing on the behavioural aspects embedded in
Schein’s framework, we can gain a more sophisticated and useful understanding of how coercive persuasion in contemporary organisations
can shape and direct subordinate behaviour and identity.

CONCLUSION

Clearly, all groups and organisations must share some norms of behaviour and have some agreement about the vision they are seeking
to achieve; otherwise, they would be incapable of functioning. However, when the norms and vision in question become all-embracing in
their scope and particularly when they prohibit critical discussion, they
can facilitate the harmful exercise of manipulative and coercive control
by leaders and managers. Coercive persuasion seeks to sidestep the
challenge of followers’ autonomy and resistance by convincing those in
subordinate positions that what is on offer is in their real best interest.
Its message is that people should embrace an organisational identity
set for them by their leaders, display enthusiastic commitment in support of organisational goals, and adopt conformist behaviours that have
been centrally sanctioned, while avoiding any behaviour likely to be
regarded as ‘deviant’.

Individual identity is a fluid and multi-faceted construct formed in the context of conformity and resistance (Collinson 2003). People do not enter
organisational life with an immutable identity which they either uphold
in an organic ‘pure’ form or which they collapse into whatever shape is
dictated to them by powerful others. Identity is always relational: ‘one
can only ever be seen to be something in relation to something else’
(Clegg, 1989: 159). A creative process of struggle, therefore, unfolds
in which neither the agents of influence nor their subjects remain fixed
in time or space, but in which they exert a reciprocal influence on the
other (Shamir, 2007). Accordingly, we would stress that these processes of coercive persuasion and of employee conformity are themselves
characterised by numerous ambiguities, inconsistencies, tensions, and
contradictions, which in turn can produce counter-productive effects as
well as the possibility of organisational change.

Nevertheless, given the constraints imposed on dissent, employee
conformity in contemporary organisations is often more evident than
resistance. Drawing on Schein’s model, this paper has critically examined leadership practices designed to reinforce employee conformity via coercive persuasion. Many of these practices have become so
widespread and ‘normal’ as to assume an unchallenged status in the
minds of organisational actors, and we have highlighted several problems that this ‘normality’ is likely to create. More critical studies of the
dynamics of coercive persuasion in everyday life are clearly required.

Notes

In the same special issue of Organisation,
Townley (2005) criticises the tendency to reduce organisational processes to the control-resistance dualism because this creates ‘a
totalitarian vision’ in which ‘not only is everything control, but also everything is resistance.’
(2005: 645).

As Simon (2005) has pointed out, the notion of Panopticon has a dual focus. On the one
hand, it depicts the story of a supervisor exerting
control from a central tower. But it also depicts
what happens to the prisoner, and in particular
how self-discipline effects deep rooted internal
change. Consistent with this perspective, our
notion of coercive persuasion also has a dual
focus, emphasising the direct impact of observation and punishment, but also the attitudinal
and behavioural transformations wrought by the
enthusiastic internalisation of an ideology sanctioned by powerful individuals.

His analysis is strikingly consistent with the
contemporaneous work of Lifton (1961), who
studied ‘thought reform’ programmes in China.
Lifton also details similar mechanisms devoted
to ‘re-education’, through the use of emotional
appeals and confession rituals.

Victims may also see rescue attempts as a
threat, since the victims may be injured or killed
during the attempt. This was precisely the fate
of 344 civilians during the Beslan school siege
in Russia in 2004.

Goffman (1968) did recognise the importance of organisational surveillance, the oppositional nature of inmates’ responses and its
close connections to identity. He argued that
within the ‘underlife’ of TIs, inmates resisted the
organisational definition of what they should
be doing and who they should be by engaging
in ‘secondary adjustments’. These forbidden
ways of ‘working the system’ demonstrated ‘to
the practitioner if no one else- that he (sic) has
some selfhood and personal autonomy beyond
the grasp of the organisation’ (Goffman 1968:
275-6).

These debates about time-space relations
and whether the home can be considered an
area of ‘free’ time and space have also tended
to neglect or underestimate a central contribution of feminist analysis over the past twenty
years, namely that domestic work often constitutes unfree time and space for women and a
source of power for men (e.g. Zaretsky 1976).

Résumé

English

This paper critically examines the neglected importance of employee conformity in organisations. More specifically, it addresses the ways in which coercive persuasion can manufacture conformity through contemporary leadership processes and corporate culture practices. Drawing on the foundational work of Schein (1961), we illustrate how the nine techniques of coercive persuasion that he identified can serve as a framework for understanding the exercise of power and the manufacture of conformity in modern organisations. In particular, we discuss this framework in relation to the phenomenon of ‘corporate culturalism’ (in which powerful leaders determine constraining norms and values for others, in the form of compelling ideologies). We argue that ideology, when embraced with sufficient vigour, can function as an invisible internal eye, ensuring that subjects themselves become the instruments of their own subjugation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of coercive persuasion in organisational discourse.